


there's a hollow in my bones

by ihopethatyouburn



Category: Homeland
Genre: F/M, carrie's first college boyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25662691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihopethatyouburn/pseuds/ihopethatyouburn
Summary: "It’s just another item on the imaginary pro/con list she keeps in her head, 'difficult to love,' circled and underlined and highlighted for emphasis."Carrie spends her life alone, until she doesn’t have to anymore. Spans decades and ends up in Moscow.
Relationships: Carrie Mathison/Jonas Hollander, Carrie Mathison/Yevgeny Gromov, Nicholas Brody/Carrie Mathison
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	there's a hollow in my bones

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by month four-going-on-five of quarantine in the US, a rewatch of season one, and a reread of Normal People by Sally Rooney, especially this line from Marianne: "Well, I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of... I have a coldness about me, I’m difficult to like."
> 
> The title is a line from Young Man in America by Anaïs Mitchell.
> 
> Thank you for reading, as always!

Fall 1994, Washington, DC

Carrie feels nothing but relief the day Maggie leaves for college. Teachers and friends keep asking her if she’s upset that she’ll be an only child for the first time; she usually indulges them with fabricated reasons why she’ll miss her sister, but only because it’s easier than the truth. The truth is that she’s spent years waiting for this moment at the back of her mind, wanting Maggie to move out so she can be left alone. Carrie knows this means her mother will pick more fights without Maggie to distract her, but it’s a small price to pay for some freedom from the crushing weight of Maggie’s first eighteen years that hung over her head every day growing up. 

Carrie thrives without Maggie: she makes the varsity field hockey team as a sophomore, she convinces her parents to let her go to Paris with her French class over Thanksgiving break, and she starts writing laughably ambitious columns for the school newspaper about the genocide in Bosnia, all without hearing her sister’s name uttered once. 

She’s happier than she’s ever been. 

+++++

Fall 1999, Princeton, New Jersey

Carrie is lying in her tiny Princeton dorm room bed with her boyfriend of nine months, though three of those months were during summer break, so she’s not really sure if they count. They’ve just smoked a lot of weed with some guys who live in a suite across the hall, and Carrie swears she can hear the blood moving from her heart all the way to her fingertips, reminding her too much of her own mortality. She prefers alcohol because she can predict how it’ll make her feel; with weed, there’s too much room for miscalculation and more often than not she ends up paranoid, withdrawn, and irritable. Like right now, when every new sound is grating and she can’t stay still. 

“What are you thinking about?” James asks dreamily, making shadow puppets with his feet in the shadow from her lamp. 

“I hate being high,” she half-answers, tracing the collar of his t-shirt, wanting to pick at the threads coming out from constant washing. 

“Why did you smoke, then?”

“Because very occasionally, it’s fun,” Carrie defends herself. She’s always been willing to suffer for the possibility of a reward.

She hears people on their way out of the building, shoes squeaking on the stairs, their voices echoing just a little too much in the stairway. The door slams just a little too loud, and she winces in response.

There are rare good highs, where she’s giggly and meditative and ravenous, but usually she just feels anxious and isolated, like the weed has removed all her social blinders and she can see how separate she is from everyone else. James is looking for a new group of guy friends, and has been trying to edge in with the stoners across the hall, even though he’s too nerdy to fit in with them. The guys tolerate him, but probably just because they like it when she comes along, especially Brian from her International Relations seminar who’s always a little too flirty with her when he sees her walking back from the shower in just a towel. 

An hour ago, that meant she had to sit in the boys’ common room watching James cracking jokes desperately and the other guys trying not to show that they were bored. To deal with it, she just kept lighting the bowl halfheartedly, trying to figure out a way to escape but not knowing where she wanted to go instead. 

“Do you ever think about being alone?” she asks James suddenly.

“Not really,” he says, genuinely answering the question. “I’m not alone that much. I have you and my roommates and my parents call me like, every other day.” 

Carrie isn’t sure what kind of answer she wanted from him, but it definitely wasn’t that. 

“No, I mean, alone in an existential sense. Like, wondering if anyone really understands you.” She can’t articulate exactly what she means and it’s making everything worse. She hears her pulse too loud in her ears like her body’s trying to warn her of danger, but it doesn’t match the soft lamp light and quiet jazz CD she has on. She can’t think clearly enough to communicate how she feels — probably the best word for it is longing, but she’s certainly not going to say that out loud. She’s pretty sure James is high enough that the conversation won’t register in the morning, but she can’t be sure.

“I understand you,” he answers, hurt, more lucid than she’d counted on. “I know all about your family, and I know you’re going to work internationally after we graduate, and I know your favorite breakfast foods.”

“Those are just facts about me, though.” 

“Well, what do you want instead?” He doesn’t sound quite angry because of the weed, but there’s an edge to his voice, both threatening and desperate. 

“I don’t know,” she pauses. “I just want to feel like I’ve found someone who gets me. Who I can talk about anything with, but who knows what I’m going to say before I say it.”

“That’s insane. No one can know what you’re going to say before you say it. People are different.” 

Carrie sighs in frustration, regretting that she brought this up in the first place. James’s main complaint about their relationship is that she doesn’t want him enough — she didn’t call him more than once a week all summer, and never complains if he hangs out with his own friends without her. Once during a big fight, he said that she didn’t want people to get close to her, and after hearing that, Carrie knows she won’t be able to explain herself to his satisfaction.

“Never mind,” she dismisses him. “Just forget I said anything.”

“Okay,” he says carefully. 

He runs his hand up her thigh, an attempt to clear the slate, but she’s not in the mood. She gets up instead and starts looking through her drawer for a pajama top. 

“I want to go to bed soon. Are you sleeping here or not?”

Unsurprisingly, he chooses to go back to his own dorm, kissing her goodbye with a little too much intensity, like maybe he can reverse her bad mood with sheer force of will.

Carrie falls into a fitful sleep, never the deep, refreshing eight hours the stoners promise she’ll have. The next morning, she calls Maggie to check in. Maybe the key to not feeling alone is actually making an effort to talk to the people you love. 

“Hey!” Maggie answers the phone sounding rushed, as always, but happy to hear from her. She’s in her second year of med school at Penn and seems to have every single day planned out in fifteen-minute increments. “I was going to call you later, but my study group got pushed to this afternoon, so this is perfect.” 

“Great.” Carrie’s never sure exactly how to respond to her sister’s weird accounting summaries of her time. “I just wanted to say hi, and see how your weekend is going.” 

“It’s busy as usual,” Maggie sighs. “Sorry again that I had to bail on you last weekend, but I really needed the extra hours in the library.”

They were supposed to get dinner the weekend before — about once a month, Maggie drives the hour from Philly to treat Carrie to a nice meal on their dad’s credit card — but Maggie had to cancel because of some massive exam she wasn’t ready for. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Carrie shrugs. “Maybe next month I’ll take the train to visit you.” 

She wasn’t upset when Maggie cancelled. It’s not like Maggie is the only one with important things to do; she had to finish a paper for her Arabic Cultures class with a professor who could bump her from the study abroad program in Jordan next semester if she didn’t turn in good work. To make up for missing the dinner with her sister, Carrie took herself out for a steak, turning down her friends’ offers to join her. Her only regret was that she’s still a few months shy of her 21st birthday and couldn’t order wine to go with it. She was a little disappointed not to see Maggie, sure, but she knew she’d hear all the same life updates and tiny quibbles over the phone, and she was perfectly capable of buying herself dinner. 

Carrie knows that Maggie’s monthly visits are supervisory, that Maggie’s trying to make up for their mother leaving two years ago by filling in her role. She appreciates the effort, but sometimes Maggie leans too hard into her authoritative tendencies and forgets that she’s only three years older than Carrie. She should be telling stories about her business school boyfriend Bill instead of asking if Carrie’s been eating enough vegetables or if she needs extra cash.

Carrie is still stuck on last night’s conversation with James, unhappy at how inarticulate she was and still thrown by his reaction, his complete lack of recognition that she’s scared of being alone. She can’t believe that he feels so secure about his place in the world.

“Do you think Bill is the guy you’re going to be with forever?” She jumps in after Maggie finishes a long story about her pathology lab partner. 

Maggie is silent for a few moments. Carrie can count on one hand the number of times she’s asked about Bill unprompted. She and Maggie don’t usually talk about their boyfriends in this much dreamy emotional detail; she certainly doesn’t volunteer much about her own relationship. But right now, she needs to know the answer.

“Yeah, he is.” Maggie’s voice gets soft. “We’ve been talking about the future a lot lately. Why do you ask?” 

Carrie tries to imagine herself and James talking about marriage or even real commitment beyond the typical college integration of friend groups and almost laughs out loud. He probably wouldn’t be opposed, but she can’t even picture keeping in touch with him from Jordan — they would, what, email each other about their days? He would tell her when his favorite dessert (chocolate cream pie) is in the dining hall? She doesn’t need that.

“Do you think he understands you?”

“What? Why wouldn’t he?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I was asking.” Again, Carrie regrets bringing it up; her hyper-rational sister will never get what she means. 

“Why do you always have to be a bitch about Bill?” Maggie has always been touchy about Carrie poking fun at him, even though she’s usually just pointing out facts, like his conservative friends, his objectively boring taste in music, and his shirt-and-sweater uniform. 

Carrie sighs. “I wasn’t!” 

“What were you trying to say, then?”

“It’s just — you’re the first person my age who’s dating the person they’re going to marry, and I guess I always thought that person would feel really special, somehow.” 

“He is special!” Maggie sounds a little too defensive. 

“You two are a good couple, but it just feels so practical.” 

“What’s wrong with practical? I’m going to be a doctor. There’s nothing wrong with being practical about my future.” 

“Just forget it,” Carrie insists. “I’m happy for you. Congrats on your future wedding.” 

“You better mean that, because I think he’s going to propose soon.” 

“Wait, really? How soon?” 

“He wants it to be a surprise. But a few months?”

“A few months? And you’re only telling me about this because I asked? Were you going to wait until your wedding invitations go out, or something?” Carrie’s trying to process everything, her stomach tying itself into knots. 

“Of course not! I was going to tell you at dinner last week.”

“But conveniently, you bailed on dinner. You could have told me when I talked to you last Sunday.”

“I thought you weren’t mad that I didn’t come for dinner!”

“I’m not. I’m mad that you’re getting engaged and didn’t say anything about it!” Carrie can feel a balloon expanding in her chest, a mixture of rage and anxiety and the self-consciousness that comes with being ignored. 

“We’re not engaged yet.”

“You will be soon!” 

“Carrie! God!” Maggie takes a deep breath. “Bill and I are getting engaged soon. We want a summer wedding, and two kids, and to find a house in the DC area after I graduate. Is that enough information for you?” 

Carrie nods even though she knows Maggie can’t see her. “I just want to know about things when you decide them. Especially when it comes to your future _husband._ That’s a big deal.” 

They say a subdued goodbye. Carrie hangs up her landline and lies down on her bed with her eyes closed, feeling much worse than she did last night. Maggie’s getting married to a man Carrie can admit is a good match, no matter how much she likes to give him shit. Meanwhile, Carrie has a boyfriend who she has to break up with before winter break, even though he’s sweet and caring and would be fine with doing long distance while she’s abroad next semester. She should feel more guilty about it than she actually does. He likes to celebrate every month they’ve been together with a proper date, usually dinner off-campus, and she just keeps waiting to love him like she should, the can’t-stop-smiling stupid love she’s supposed to have for her first boyfriend. 

Maggie found someone she wants to be with for the rest of her life, but Carrie can’t imagine that ever happening for her.

+++++

Summer 2000, Washington, DC

Maggie and Bill get married in July and are somehow blessed with a 75-degree day, unheard of in Virginia at that time of year. Maggie makes up some bullshit about Carrie being the _most important_ bridesmaid to mollify her because she’s not the maid of honor, as if Carrie would want to be required to manage even more of her sister’s anxiety. The wedding is small, since Maggie and Bill have the same group of grad school friends and the Mathison extended family is limited. The ceremony is a traditional Catholic one, which is important to Maggie for reasons Carrie can’t figure out. 

Carrie is freshly back from her semester in Jordan, and she’s excited to tell everyone about her host family, the progress she made on her Arabic, how living there crystalized her understanding of Middle Eastern geopolitics. The last is admittedly heavy for a wedding, but she doesn’t even get a chance to share any of that, since all her aunt and Bill’s cousins and Maggie’s med school friends want to do is ask her if she’s seeing anybody.

A couple hours into the reception, Maggie finds Carrie sitting outside in the garden with a water glass filled with Chardonnay. 

“Hey,” Maggie says as she sits next to her on the bench, careful not to get any dirt on her wedding dress. 

“Hi! How are you, Mrs. Dunn?”

“I’m not changing my last name,” Maggie rolls her eyes. 

“I don’t want to imagine how that conversation went with Bill,” Carrie grins. “I was trying to get you alone earlier, but people were basically waiting in line to talk to you.” 

Maggie sighs, exhausted. “That’s certainly what it felt like. I needed to get out of there.” She closes her eyes and basks in the sun for a moment. 

“So, do you feel different? Now that you’re married?”

“Mostly I feel tired. Happy, of course, but tired.” 

Carrie nods. She’s exhausted and she didn’t have to do even a fraction of the planning Maggie did.

“I feel like I should be smoking a cigarette right now, or something, to commemorate this big crazy day.” 

“Maggie!” Carrie mock-scolds. “You’re going to be a _doctor._ I can’t believe you would even think about smoking.” 

“It just seems like the way a young bride would cope when she realizes the weight of what she’s done. Like if I were in a movie, I would definitely sneak out of my own wedding reception and bum a cigarette off of someone.”

“Well, I don’t have any cigarettes, sorry to disappoint.”

Maggie turns and wraps her arms around Carrie suddenly. Luckily, Carrie has drunk enough of her wine that she doesn’t have to worry about it spilling. 

“I’m really proud of you,” Carrie whispers into her shoulder. “My married doctor sister.”

“I’m not a doctor for two more years,” Maggie corrects her, tears evident in her voice. 

“Do you wish Mom were here?” Carrie asks after a few beats.

“No, not really.”

“You don’t?” 

“Do I hope she can meet Bill someday? Sure. Do I wish she were here, inside, at this very moment? No. I honestly haven’t even thought about her all day.”

“Good.” Carrie nods decisively.

“I guess you’ve been thinking about her, though.”

“Only because I’ve had about seventeen people ask me today when I’m getting married, as if I’m not twenty-one years old. Even you getting married at twenty-four is young.” 

“It’s because of my schedule —” Carrie cuts her off.

“I know, this is part of your five-year plan, and you’re going to be working all next summer, and once you’re a resident you won’t have any free time at all. You’ve told me.”

“I just hate having to justify it to people,” Maggie says in a small voice.

“It’s fine. I get it.” Carrie brushes past her sister’s concern. “I was just thinking of Mom because I was trying to decide if she’d be pressuring me to find a new boyfriend. If she’d be reminding me that you’re the golden child with everything figured out.”

“I’m not the golden child!”

“We both know it. It’s fine,” Carrie repeats.

“You just spent six months living with a family of strangers in Jordan, for fuck’s sake. You’re so much braver than I’ll ever be.” 

“Okay, okay, I wasn’t trying to turn this into a competition.” 

“Great.” Maggie steals Carrie’s wine out of her hand and drains the glass. “I still don’t really get why you and James broke up.”

Carrie sighs. “He was boring.”

“I thought he was nice!”

“You met him a total of twice, and no offense, but you don’t have the best track record picking the world’s most interesting men.” 

Maggie makes a face. “You don’t get to say that on my wedding day.”

“You’re right. Sorry.”

“I accept your very heartfelt apology.”

“Maybe that’s what Mom would yell at me about if she were here.” Carrie is careful to keep her voice light. “She’d say I’m too cold and my expectations are too high.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Maggie tries to reassure her.

“You didn’t hear the fights we had after you left for Georgetown. I don’t think she’d be surprised to hear that I’m single.” 

“Carrie,” Maggie says softly. 

Carrie takes a deep breath and forces a smile. “Sorry! It’s your wedding day. I’m okay, I promise.”

“Why don’t we go inside?” Maggie’s always been good at redirecting the conversation, offering a new goal to focus on. “They’re going to cut the cake any minute.” 

Carrie reluctantly follows Maggie inside and sighs when her sister melts away almost immediately into the crowd of well-wishers. She goes back to her seat at her empty table; her dad is dancing his heart out with such enthusiasm it’s equal parts embarrassing and endearing, and Bill’s family members have dispersed around the room. She’s not really sure who any of the older people are, anyway, and if she’s going to have to see them at future holidays or not. She gets two pieces of cake and finishes them before anyone else comes back to the table, content to sit there by herself methodically eating: the individual layers first, then the sides, then the top, where the frosting is thickest. It’s her sister’s wedding and she’ll do whatever the fuck she wants to.

+++++

Spring 2011, Washington, DC

_“How come it’s so hard to talk with anyone who wasn’t there about anything at all?”_

Carrie arrives home soaking wet from her veteran support group meeting (read: illicit run-in with a suspected terrorist) feeling giddy, almost high. She feels the same satisfaction she does when she finally gets an answer out of an asset she’s been working towards for weeks, an almost godlike realization of her power. But there’s something else underneath the bravura, something softer. She didn’t know what to expect from her interaction with Brody, her first since she started keeping tabs on his every move, since she became an active participant in his household, almost, since she became able to predict his behavior better than his own wife or kids can. She knows she’s obsessed; she doesn’t need Virgil’s disapproving voice in her ear when she can look through the notebooks she’s filled with his behaviors and rituals, looking for patterns, leaving no stone unturned. 

But still, she didn’t count on the jolt of electricity that came when she and Brody were outside in the parking lot, when he asked _Where was it you served again?_ She’s not the enemy, not a case officer looking for whispers of impropriety, but a fellow veteran. She didn’t fight like he did, but she served even so, the smell of smoke from rebels’ warning bombs outside the US embassy still fresh in her mind.

Carrie got more than she bargained for tonight, a rare occurrence since her work life is now so laughably structured and her personal life is almost nonexistent. Something’s different, she can’t quite explain, but she felt seen for the first time in a long while, an implicit assurance that she’s not alone. She was surprised by Brody’s candor; she’d expected the guarded exterior he puts up for Jessica and his kids, vulnerable only when he thinks no one’s there to see him hiding in the corner of his bedroom. 

_How come it’s so hard to talk about with people who weren’t there?_

The implication being: _you’re a person I can share things with. Not my family, not the press, who get only canned and pre-arranged stories._ Carrie can tell even the good stories shared in the Washington Post and on local news are prepared ahead of time, edited slightly to make himself look better, alternately heroic or relatable depending on who he’s talking to. He doesn’t mention the horror; there’s nothing to gain from it. Her entire job consists of weaving fake identities of her own, and she’s really fucking good at it, but even she couldn’t have fabricated the spontaneity and pure joy she saw tonight in the rain.

Brody thought he was going to a support group meeting, so of course he was prepared to share his feelings, but still, it feels like more than that. She knows it was more than that. She keeps replaying their conversation in the parking lot, the roll of thunder so deliciously ominous, ignoring the faint whisper from her better judgement that she’s about to make a giant fucking mess. 

_How come it’s so hard to talk with anyone who wasn’t there about anything at all?_

She hadn’t planned on being so honest; she’d really just orchestrated the meeting to remind Brody that the CIA hadn’t forgotten about him. But in the months since she was ordered home from Iraq, she’s found it harder to hold ordinary conversations, the kind of ego-puffing small talk she’s great at when she’s in the field, but falls apart when she’s around people who know her, who expect her to be consistent from day to day. Her only solace, really, is in the flings she has with desperate men from whichever jazz bar she’s at that night, where she can find white noise in the long, shuddering orgasms she just can’t give herself.

She usually prefers the nights when she doesn’t have to be a benched intelligence officer returning from her second tour in a war zone, or with her family, a benched intelligence officer returning from war who might have a manic episode at any moment. But tonight, she felt a real connection for the first time in years, a shift of a degree or two, finally settling the balance she’d spent her twenties searching for. It was exactly what she could never explain to her exes or to Maggie, who always thought she was being too picky, looking for excuses to end relationships when the guys didn’t have enough to offer. 

Carrie still can’t justify it, but now she knows that ineffable quality exists, a mixture of deep recognition and a little bit of danger, the electricity of two people finally falling into each other after being kept apart for so long.

She tosses and turns in bed that night, her apartment too quiet and empty, missing the reassurance that she could check in on the Brody family whenever she wanted, an exceedingly strange comfort that she will mention to exactly no one, not even Virgil. 

She’s lived alone her whole adult life, her dad paying the security deposit and first month’s rent on her very first one-bedroom apartment as a combination graduation and congrats-on-being-hired-by-the-CIA present. Maggie was pissed because Carrie’s rent was double her own in West Philly, so even though they received identical college graduation gifts (wrapped in sorry-your-mother-left-you guilt), Carrie technically got the better deal. Carrie always liked living by herself, loved the freedom to spread out and be her whole manic self when the situation demanded it, without anyone to make her justify where she’s going and what she’s doing and with whom. Her current apartment is a step up from her first, bigger than she needs but rented in a huff when she was unceremoniously shipped back from Baghdad. 

Tonight is the first time it feels too big. She usually doesn’t even realize the silence, her own internal monologue creating enough noise, but now she’s thinking about the chatter she always heard in the Brody house, the activity of a family, and she can’t get it out of her head. She can’t stop imagining Brody climbing into bed next to her, his lips on her neck and his hands working their way underneath her shirt.

+++++

Winter 2015, Berlin, Germany

Carrie and Jonas talk about marriage exactly once during their two-year relationship. It’s not even a conversation, really, it’s a quiet dare from Jonas, made after they get home from the ostentatious Düring Foundation holiday party. The inciting incident was the twenty interminable minutes during which they were forced to listen to their publicity manager Katherine’s in-depth plans for her New Year’s Day destination wedding that no one in the office was invited to. Jonas smiled politely the whole time, as always, but Carrie could see his eyebrows rising higher and higher towards his hairline. She tried to cut Katherine off — she used to redirect conversations for a living, after all — but without success, the almost-bride clearly not listening to anything Carrie said. 

“What about you two?” She ended her monologue in the worst possible way, looking at Carrie and Jonas expectantly. “Is marriage coming anytime soon?”

It wasn’t surprising, really, considering they’re both in their mid-thirties and have been together for more than a year; Carrie understood how it looked from the outside. But still, what a rude fucking question. She laughed it off with a bit of effort, her knuckles white from clutching her wine glass too hard. 

“No plans at the moment!” she responded brightly, with a practiced but sunny smile on her face. She was torn between wanting Katherine to leave, and trying to avoid being alone with Jonas in the palpably awkward aftermath. Otto had asked similar nosy questions recently, but never to her and Jonas at the same time, putting the burden of explanation on both of them at once to say, _We’ve been aggressively avoiding that discussion._ Luckily, a drunk Laura joined them just then, rambling about Germany’s hidden surveillance of civilians, too far gone to pick a party-appropriate topic of conversation.

Jonas is quiet on the cab ride home, but he keeps his hand on her thigh, his thumb tracing slow patterns. Jonas is endlessly frustrating because sometimes he’s so easy to read and sometimes she has no earthly idea what he’s thinking; right now, it’s the latter. Once they’re home, he waits until Carrie is busy brushing her teeth to ask:

“So have you ever thought about it? Getting married?” 

Carrie’s hand closes too tightly over the tube of toothpaste, so it overflows off her toothbrush into the sink. She can see a slight smirk on his face, and he’s leaning heavily against the wall the way he does when he’s a little too drunk. Drunk enough to test her, as she knows he must be doing: they’re both aware that his first marriage ended badly, especially for his son, and that she’s never even been close to marriage, unless she counts the men she’s slept with who were married to other women. He just wants to see what she’ll say, if she’ll run screaming from this barest hint of commitment. He can’t actually want her to agree. 

Carrie is convinced there has to be something secretly fucked up about Jonas underneath his perfect exterior. She’s a good liar when she needs to be, but she’s not the most convincing image of a woman looking to settle down, with so many of her professional missteps available to the public and her personal shortcomings readily on display. She’s closed off, she’s defensive, she has a big ego, and Jonas is just a little _too_ understanding. There’s no way he wants her to agree.

“I —” she flounders. She has thought about it actually, but in the abstract way her CIA training taught her to run through possible best- and worst-case scenario outcomes, though she’s not sure if marriage is a best- or worst-case. It’s not a good idea for them, for her, for Franny, right now. Jonas knows that they both have baggage. “It would be complicated. For our children. With my visa. I’m not — I don’t think this is a conversation we should be having now.” 

The clock on her bedside table reads 1:42am. 

Jonas smiles wider at her stuttering. “I know. You’re right. I’m just glad to hear you’ve thought about it.” He kisses her cheek and then leaves her alone in the bathroom with her enormous mound of toothpaste. 

Carrie has no idea how to interpret their conversation. She knows couples are supposed to “discuss” their future, but she doesn’t know what that entails, never having actually done that in a functional way. She falls asleep feeling empty and nervous about further questioning, but she needn’t have worried. Jonas makes breakfast for her and Franny the next morning without referencing the party other than a complaint about his pounding headache.

As the weeks wear on and Jonas doesn’t bring up marriage again, Carrie starts to relax. She does have to dodge Maggie’s nosy questions about Jonas, always disguised in a practical inquiry: does she think she’ll ever want to move to a bigger apartment? Does Jonas want to be closer to his family outside the city? She doesn’t mind that, though, having figured out years ago that the best way to stop her sister from worrying about her dating life is with bland denials: she likes her current apartment, Jonas doesn’t mind driving an hour to see his parents once a month or so, and she doesn’t know what will happen in the future.

She doesn’t want to disturb the equilibrium she’s developed over the last year, with Franny and Jonas and work and this city she’s fallen in love with. Carrie used to wake up most mornings waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Jonas to realize that she’s too hard to get close to and decide it’s not worth the effort. She’s over that now, for the most part, but still: she’s happy, and she has a good life, and she’d be an idiot to do anything to change that. She doesn’t hate the idea of marriage, but it’s not time yet.

Jonas isn’t her perfect equal, doesn’t stare right into the depths of her soul, but the past year has taught her that maybe she shouldn’t have dismissed her college boyfriend for remembering what she likes to eat for breakfast. Attention is a form of love, she’s learned, and even though there’s no spark of identification, no deep current of electricity, she’s never made it this far before on heat alone.

+++++

Winter 2016, New York City

Carrie meets Mira for dinner one November evening at an Italian restaurant in Tribeca, a few weeks after Elizabeth Keane is elected president. She’s late and annoyed, about her train that stopped for ten minutes under the East River, about the shitty wintry mix coming down from the sky, about a crisis that popped up just as she wanted to leave work. She calms down, though, when she finds Mira sitting at a table in the back, smiling warmly at her. 

“It’s so nice to see you,” Carrie sighs as she holds onto Mira’s hug for an extra second. 

“It’s good to see you too,” Mira says as they settle into their seats. “I think congratulations are in order after Keane’s big win.”

“Thanks.” Carrie laughs a little at the absurdity that she did actually help get the very first woman elected president of the United States. She was just one of many strategists, but no one else had her depth of intelligence experience. “I definitely deserve all the credit.”

“What’s next for you and Keane?”

“Just some strategy meetings for now, as an informal advisor. I have ideas about limiting the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities, but she doesn’t want anyone in the intelligence community finding out, obviously. So I’m a source on deep background for the time being.”

Mira nods knowingly. “Ah. So, the translation is… don’t tell anyone about this.”

“You know the drill.”

“Of course. And how’s Franny doing?”

Carrie smiles, remembering how excited Franny was when Mira came to visit, showing Mira all her stuffed animals and describing the various families in great detail. “She’s the same. She’s great. Her preschool teacher told me the other day that she likes to make people line up and tie their shoes for them. She just learned how.”

Carrie feels a little silly talking about Franny’s preschool class, the jump from the future President Keane to shoelace tying making her head spin, but Mira is laughing at her story, so it can’t be all bad. She’s never really been responsible for her country and her daughter at the same time.

“How are you? What’s new at work?” Mira works in childhood education at UNICEF, and the last project Carrie heard about was a fund to recruit and house teachers in rural India.

“I just got back from Hyderabad on a work trip, and of course my parents were upset I couldn’t make it to Mumbai to see them while I was there, so there was the usual hysteria about me living so far away.”

“Would you ever move back permanently?” Carrie knows Mira floated the idea to Saul several times over the years, but she’s not sure how serious she was about leaving her whole life behind. 

“Not yet.” Mira sounds confident. “Maybe someday, but I’m happy here. And, since it’s related, I guess now is the time to tell you that I’m seeing someone.” 

“Oh! That’s great!” Carrie pastes on her required grin, but she feels a knot form in the depths of her stomach, reminding her that other women are inherently more desirable than she is. Even Mira, who usually occupies a safe, sexless, familial location in Carrie’s brain. It’s an automatic, instinctive thought; the idea of dating right now sounds terrible, and she doesn’t have room for anyone new in her life. It’s just another item on the imaginary pro/con list she keeps in her head, “difficult to love,” circled and underlined and highlighted for emphasis. 

At least Mira’s even with Saul now, sort of. She probably deserves to know about Allison, but Carrie isn’t going to be the one to tell her, about the relationship or the brutal murder.

“Thanks,” Mira grins. “My cousin who lives in Queens set us up, which I thought would be a mistake, but it’s actually been great so far. We’d been out a couple times when I saw you last month, but there wasn’t anything to tell quite yet.”

“I’m glad to hear it!” Carrie manages to respond.

She didn’t realize how much she valued Mira’s October visit until now. She was still sensitive from her breakup with Jonas, still is, really, and the confirmation that Mira was alone and happy helped Carrie breathe easier. Hearing about Mira’s new relationship is an upset, bigger than it should be, but it hurts nonetheless. 

She does her best to shake off the impact. The rest of the dinner passes quickly and happily, the two of them reminiscing about deathly boring CIA functions and all the countless hours Carrie used to spend at the Berenson house. They hug goodbye after a full three hours, separating as Mira hails a passing cab and Carrie heads for the subway. She slumps into a seat on the A train back to Brooklyn, eyes closed, grateful for the twenty minutes of empty time to reset her churning brain. She knows it’s silly to feel betrayed that Mira is dating; if anything, she should be thrilled that Mira found someone who actually pays attention to her. But still, the thought is there, that she’s incapable, inferior.

“Sorry I’m a little late,” Carrie apologizes to Latisha as she walks in her front door after trudging home from the subway in the biting wind. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Latisha says as she gets up from the couch, because Carrie’s paying her and she has to say that.

“How was Franny?”

“She really didn’t want to go to sleep, but other than that, she was great as usual.”

Carrie grimaces in sympathy. “That’s been happening a lot lately. I hope she wasn’t too difficult.”

After sending Latisha on her way, Carrie climbs up the stairs to get ready for bed. She can see a shadow of curly hair in the column of light that shines into Franny’s room from the hallway. 

“Mama?” Franny pipes up as she edges out from the darkness of her room, holding her stuffed rabbit.

Carrie sighs. “Hi, my love.” She opens her arms and lets Franny run into them, lifting her up so that they’re almost eye level with each other. “It’s so late. Why are you still awake?”

“I’m not tired,” Franny insists, her fluttering eyelids betraying her. “Where were you?”

“I was with a friend, eating dinner.” 

“Which friend?”

“Do you remember Mira? She came over to visit last month. I know her from before you were born, when I used to live in Washington DC.” 

Franny nods. “She was nice.” 

“Yes, she was.” Carrie kisses Franny on the cheek. “Now, it’s definitely time to go to sleep.”

Franny’s arms tighten around Carrie’s neck. “Not yet!”

Carrie knows she’s supposed to put Franny back to sleep immediately; the passive-aggressive emails she gets from Franny’s preschool always emphasize the importance of maintaining habits and the benefits of sleep for tiny developing brains, but she can’t bring herself to have this fight. 

“Fine. Can you sit quietly in my room while I get ready for bed?”

“Yes!” Franny says excitedly.

“You can only stay up for ten more minutes, though.” 

Carrie deposits Franny on her hastily-made bed and lets her do somersaults in the middle as she watches herself in the mirror opposite. After Carrie gets back from the bathroom, Franny has wiggled her way up to the head of the bed and is playing with the pillows, stacking them on top of each other. 

“Can I sleep in here?” Franny asks, smiling her sweetest smile. 

“Franny,” Carrie tries her best to be stern. She’s not good at it most days, and she feels so raw right now, she would actually love to fall asleep cuddling her daughter. “You only get to sleep in here as a special treat, like if you have a nightmare. You know that.” 

“You said tonight was a special treat.”

“Hmm,” Carrie taps her chin theatrically. “I don’t think I said that.”

“Latisha was here as a special treat!” 

Oh. It’s possible she did accidentally use those words last night when she told Franny her babysitter would be staying late, but Carrie doesn’t have the energy to explain her mistake. She sighs and pulls down the quilt so Franny can get under it. 

“Okay,” she allows. “But we’re both going to sleep now.” 

She rearranges the pillows and turns off all the lights. “Good night,” she whispers to Franny.

“Sleep tight,” Franny says back, parroting what’s usually Carrie’s second line. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” 

Carrie rubs Franny’s back to settle her down. She knows she’ll wake up with Franny’s foot in her side or her face, but for the moment she’s glad for the fruity smell of her daughter’s shampoo and the sight of her curled up hugging her rabbit to her chest, reminding Carrie that she doesn’t have to fall asleep alone every night.

+++++

Spring 2019, Moscow, Russia

Carrie tunes out the real estate broker as she chatters loudly about the brand-new kitchen appliances in the apartment she and Yevgeny are touring. They’ve been living together since last winter, when Carrie moved into his apartment, but Yevgeny insisted on finding a place that could be theirs instead of his. 

Carrie feels settled in Moscow, settled with Yevgeny, her life a perfect combination of stable and secretive, publicly disavowing America and then doing the achingly slow work to rebuild networks under his nose. Despite the deception, this is the most herself she’s ever felt in a relationship: Yevgeny understands, at his core, both her patriotism and her betrayal. He knows her most horrifying thoughts and he’s accepted her without question, at his own personal and professional risk. 

“What do you think?” he asks her from across the kitchen island, smirking as she stares blankly at the broker hyping up the professional-grade stove, as though Carrie cooks. 

“There are four bathrooms,” she whispers back. “Why are there four bathrooms?” Yevgeny keeps dragging her to open houses and asking her opinion on each one, even though he knows full well that she has exactly zero opinions on interior design. She’s fine with any apartment that has a separate office where she can write. 

Having a nice place to live is important to Yevgeny, though, and Carrie has learned to indulge him over the past year, letting him buy her nice jewelry and lingerie because he wants to and he can. She’s made baby steps towards a new wardrobe and shoes that aren’t black ankle boots, but she hasn’t graduated to learning the finer points of real estate yet. 

After the kitchen walkthrough, the broker leaves them alone to explore the rest of the massive apartment. Yevgeny finds her in the room that could become her study. 

“I think we should rent this place,” he says, watching carefully to gauge her real reaction.

Carrie is already imagining her future study layout, figuring out how she can make the most of her wall space. The apartment is flashier than she’d ordinarily like, but it feels right for the two of them, everything about her life in Russia unexpected but somehow a perfect fit. 

“I love it,” she answers.

She takes his hand and leads him out to the living room where the broker is. 

“What did you two decide? Is this the place that will make you happy?” She’s as pushy as any American salesperson.

Carrie smiles and looks at Yevgeny. 

“Yes,” she nods. “It is. What do we do next?”


End file.
